Day 1

We slept very hard last night although we didn't sleep long.  Things looked better after some sleep and a good breakfast; the Comfort Inn had a good variety with eggs, sausages, waffles, yogurt etc. After that we had a good look at the bike boxes because they appeared to have been opened by someone during transit. The bottoms had been fully opened with every staple pulled through the cardboard. Amazingly nothing was missing; perhaps the perpetrators were looking for better bikes than ours. Then I assembled the bikes and we tested them. Eventually we got underway just before 11 a.m. and peddled eastward along country roads parallel to the Trans-Canada Hy. These roads were smooth and not busy.  Some of the cattle barns along the roads were the biggest I have ever seen. One way to make a cow look small is to house her in a big barn.  One of the barns seemed to cover more than a football field.  Eventually we had to ride on the Trans-Canada Hy which was good in that we had a good paved shoulder with a rumble strip separating us from the traffic; it was bad in that the traffic was quite heavy.
The weather was great, warm but not hot and a gentle wind from the west. We rode about 55 km in bit over 3 hours. The flowers in Hope are doing well with the rhododendrons in full bloom.